The Psychology of Friendship

Edited by Mahzad Hojjat and Anne Moyer

Chapters reflect contemporary developments and research around friendship

Features content on friendship and social media, friendship with past romantic partners, the role of friendship in romantic relationships, friendship among co-workers, mentors and animals as friends, and more

Fills the gap in scholarly research on friendship by including information on both the beneficial and detrimental aspects of this important bond

The Psychology of Friendship

Edited by Mahzad Hojjat and Anne Moyer

Description

In the late 20th and 21st centuries, the meteoric rise of countless social media platforms and mobile applications have illuminated the profound need friendship and connection have in all of our lives; and yet, very few scholarly volumes have focused on this unique and important bond during this new era of relating to one another.

Exploring such topics as friendship and social media, friendship with current and past romantic partners, co-workers, mentors, and even pets, editors Mahzad Hojjat and Anne Moyer lead an expert group of global contributors as they each explore how friendship factors within our lives today.

What does it mean to be a friend? What roles do friendships play in our own development? How do we befriend those across the race, ethnicity, gender, and orientation spectrums? What happens when a friendship turns sour? What is the effect of friendship - good and bad - on our mental health? Providing a much needed update to the field of interpersonal relations, The Psychology of Friendship serves as a field guide for readers as they shed traditional definitions of friendship in favor of contemporary contexts and connections.

Chapter 17: Conclusion: Friendship: An Echo, a Hurrah and Other Reflections Daniel Perlman

The Psychology of Friendship

Edited by Mahzad Hojjat and Anne Moyer

Author Information

Mahzad Hojjat is a social psychologist and Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Dr. Hojjat has taught, researched, and written about close relationships for the last 20 years. Her research focuses on a variety of topics including resilience, satisfaction, betrayal, and forgiveness in friendships and romantic relationships.

Anne Moyer has been a faculty member in the Department of Psychology at Stony Brook University since 2001. Her research interests include psychosocial issues surrounding cancer and cancer risk, medical decision making, research synthesis and meta-analysis and the psychology of research participation. She and co-editor, Mahzad Hojjat, became friends and collaborators while in graduate school together.

Contributors:

Rebecca G. AdamsDepartment of GerontologyUniversity of North Carolina at GreensboroGreensboro, NC

The Psychology of Friendship

Edited by Mahzad Hojjat and Anne Moyer

Reviews and Awards

"Research on close relationship really has come into its own in the last two decades. But among behavioral scientists, it sometimes seems that love (and related constructs like jealousy and hate) get all the attention. Yet, friendships are what sustain our psyches and influence our physical wellbeing. Psychologists Mahzad Hojjat and Anne Moyer have collected together the leading thinkers whose research programs focus on friendship. Representing perspectives from biological to social-cultural, childhood to the elderly, these investigators have produced some of the clearest writing in this area, and the collection itself will be exceedingly valuable both to scholars and students." -- Peter Salovey, President of the University and Chris Argyris Professor of Psychology Yale University

"This volume elegantly brings the research community up to date on the extremely important topic of friendship, which is so central to human experience. An initially small body of existing research has recently begun to expand, with attention to widely diverse friendship types and contexts . This book does a wonderful job of pulling together this literature with a series of chapters with scholarly reviews each focusing on one of these domains, and consistently addressing what we mean by friendship and how it operates and interacts with the rest of human experience. Anyone doing research on friendship needs this book." -- Arthur Aron, Research Professor, Department of Psychology, Stony Brook University; Visiting Scholar, Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley

"Hojjat and Moyer creatively and thoroughly present a volume on friendship that contributes to the field. With an eye on topics that are less mainstream but of relevance and importance, the authors create a book that adds to our larger understanding of friendship across the developmental stages, and notably stimulate our thinking about the many layers of friendship that exist in our lives. Students, researchers, clinicians, and others will appreciate the diverse coverage in the book and the accessibility of the information within its pages." -- PsycCRITIQUES